How much studying and preparation did you do for the CCNA?

Abigaille

Hello,

I was wondering how much previous experience and preparation did you did beforehand to pass the CCNA?

I just want to make sure that I am not under preparing by comparing other peoples experience..

My history is passed N+ A+ have 4 years of desktop support/network experience. (not any corp wide large enterprise experience)
So I am familier with basic networking.
But I have never worked with the Cisco IOS before.

I have the Richard Deal McGrawHill CCNa Study Guide book and I have been reading and studying it for the last month and I have only like 4 four chapters left which I will finish before my bootcamp. Then I will be taking a 5 day boot camp through trainingcamp.com and taking the test there. I also have a simulator which I have been playing with and creating my own 'networks' in.

I am hopeing that this is enough.


what did you all do? Is this enough?

benbuiltpc

It took me 1 year. I went through the academy for all 4 semesters. After semester 2 I easily passed INTRO. But it wasn't enough for ICND. The academy courses were pretty leisurely and I had no prior Cisco experience.

Netstudent

That might be enough to get you over a 849. Just try and get as much sim or rack time as you possibly can for frame-relay, ospf,eigrp,vlans/vtp and stp.

I studied for 4 months hard core on top of school and work. I read a couple hours everyday, I read 3 books. Rereading material over and over. Bought my own gear and stayed up a lot of late nights on that and i never stopped thinking about cisco. I swear I would dream about cisco concepts. I'm wierd like that. I don't work on the "networking" side but rather the sytem admin side. So yes it is definately feasible without real world cisco experience, but hard to pass without your own gear or a good simulator.

As far as backround networking knowledge before CCNA, I had a fair amount. Mainly from school. I have only been in the industry for 7months. System administartor is my first real career type job after earning an A.S.

Pash

Netstudent wrote:

That might be enough to get you over a 849. Just try and get as much sim or rack time as you possibly can for frame-relay, ospf,eigrp,vlans/vtp and stp.

I studied for 4 months hard core on top of school and work. I read a couple hours everyday, I read 3 books. Rereading material over and over. Bought my own gear and stayed up a lot of late nights on that and i never stopped thinking about cisco. I swear I would dream about cisco concepts. I'm wierd like that. I don't work on the "networking" side but rather the sytem admin side. So yes it is definitely feasible without real world cisco experience, but hard to pass without your own gear or a good simulator.

As far as backround networking knowledge before CCNA, I had a fair amount. Mainly from school. I have only been in the industry for 7months. System administartor is my first real career type job after earning an A.S.

Wow this pretty much seems the norm then I also have 7 months experience in the industry, spent 3-4 months studying hard core also, not possible to pass the exam without at least trying a simulation of cisco routers and switches.

LOkrasa

In my opinion, you cant pass without some real equipment. At least one router to mess around with from eBay...

jediknight

Netstudent wrote:

That might be enough to get you over a 849. Just try and get as much sim or rack time as you possibly can for frame-relay, ospf,eigrp,vlans/vtp and stp.

I studied for 4 months hard core on top of school and work. I read a couple hours everyday, I read 3 books. Rereading material over and over. Bought my own gear and stayed up a lot of late nights on that and i never stopped thinking about cisco. I swear I would dream about cisco concepts. I'm wierd like that. I don't work on the "networking" side but rather the sytem admin side. So yes it is definitely feasible without real world cisco experience, but hard to pass without your own gear or a good simulator.

As far as backround networking knowledge before CCNA, I had a fair amount. Mainly from school. I have only been in the industry for 7months. System administartor is my first real career type job after earning an A.S.

Going for CCNA is very doable without equipment and using SIMs (I didn't have any hardware at all and used SIMs), but I must say that having the actual hardware is a big bonus as you will gain the following:

- Hands on with the hardware and setting up your own labs, cabling (actually using the Rollover cable to hook into the console port and logging into the device), powering the Cisco device on and watching POST, password recovery... A SIM cannot provide this to you. It looks better to a potential employer if you have physically worked with a Cisco device "AND" have CCNA certification that to just have CCNA.

- Confidence in working the CLI... Some SIMs are really buggy and you will not have the entire pool of commands to play with or some just don't work at all.

But again, yes It is 100% doable as long as you have good study habits and use the SIM so you can at least practice the commands and see the output. Just don't rely 100% on them in your future studies on your Cisco career. You will definitely need some hardware if you decide to go the NP track. As far as what I had going into this, I was a Desktop Support Tech with A+ and N+ Certs. As far as I see it, N+ is very helpful, but not needed as The INTRO stuff will cover N+ and beyond as well as ramp you up on the Cisco way of things. Good Luck in your studies and this site is a great resource if you have questions.

rakem

i did about 8 Months of home study. Got a bunch of text books and exam sims and router rims, as well as a few borrowed routers from work.

So 8 months of study, maybe about 15 hours a week. Passed CCNA first time with 937.

p.s i recommend hardware... you can learn a lot more when you see some debug commands in action

NeonNoodle

I have been studying for three months now. Of course, life intrudes on my studying quite often, so it's been an inconsistent three months. Fortunately, I was a network engineer for three years five years ago. That has made it much easier for me to work with the equipment because I remembered most of commands right away. (I can still recall the first time I consoled into a router. How mysterious! So it can take a bit of time just to feel comfortable with the interface. And that's one big reason to have at least one real router that you can play with.) Anyway, the biggest headache for me now though, and the reason I haven't tested yet, is trying to remember all the minutiae. But the test is coming soon. I'm not sure whether to take it before or after my wedding, though